Regular viewers of ours have of course met these economists separately before over the years, starting in 1991, when Karl Case took me to a spanking new, marvelously marbled office building in downtown Boston to explain that his and my pension fund, TIAA-CREF – and therefore Case and I ourselves – now owned it. The developer had defaulted on its loan, provided by TIAA-CREF.

(A similar thing happened on Monday in Manhattan with the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village housing development, where several pension funds are left with what may be near-worthless claims, given how steeply the property has declined in value. The Boston building by contrast, recovered its value, as did the developer his property.)

As you’ll see tonight, things are Peter Cooper-bad in parts of Atlanta. As for the latest Case-Shiller report (released Tuesday morning for November), the raw data show a continued decline in average prices across the country with Charlotte, Tampa, Seattle, and manic-depressive Las Vegas all hitting four-year lows. (Las Vegas prices are down 55 percent from their peak and have returned to about where they were at the turn of the millennium.)

Some cities’ housing markers continue to show price increases including San Francisco (8 months in a row), San Diego (7 months), and both Denver and Phoenix (6 months). But when you seasonally adjust the numbers (winter obviously being a lousy time to sell a house), the picture looks brighter. Maybe the best summary is the headline of the news release accompanying the latest Case-Shiller report: “Mixed Messages in the Data.”

Meanwhile, Case and Shiller themselves, as you can see on Tuesday’s NewsHour, are pretty much as chipper as ever. And indeed when we reached Shiller by phone to let him know when the segment would air, he was in Davos enjoying some Swiss chocolate at the World Economic Forum.